We who live in regions of relative stability and prosperity in the so-called developed world, we who are free of the uncertainty and the unpredictability that are part of daily life in war zones, will occasionally be startled out of our false sense of security and certainty. Such occasions are generally rare. Yet we seem determined to maintain our sense of privileged steadiness in the face of a constant stream of disturbing images and reports that fill the electronic and print media. They remind us daily of the reality of ongoing wars, the horror of terror attacks, and the despair of vast numbers of families and individuals who have left everything in order to seek refuge from violence and danger, from ruined streets and houses, from bombs and bullets.

The psychic numbing we collectively experience is a peculiar aspect of contemporary reality. Images of cars and trucks crashing through crowds of people, smoke and flames issuing from the explosion of precision-guided missiles and cluster bombs, grief and carnage from the acts of suicide bombers in mosques and churches, though ever-present on our screens and in our printed media, are all somehow strangely distant. It was therefore as a great personal shock to witness at close range the immediate human anguish of catastrophic injury in a young man from a nearby town.

While waiting to be discharged after spending most of the day in the Emergency Ward of the local hospital, I became aware of some commotion outside the double doors that separated the ward from the outside world. The doors suddenly sprung open and a young man in his middle to late twenties, barefoot and dressed only in a pair of shorts burst into the main corridor in extreme distress. He repeatedly cried for help and in his agitation, ran straight past the monitoring station where several doctors and nurses were quietly gathered. I noticed that shards of skin were dangling from one of his arms, and that both of his legs and much of his torso were bright red in colour. A doctor called out, “What happened?” Between his anguished calls, he cried out, “Petrol fire!” I heard someone say “Get him into a shower” and two doctors sprinted after him as he headed towards the main body of the hospital.

Some ten minutes later, he was escorted back into the emergency ward and led into the cubicle alongside the one in which I was situated. I could see that much of the skin from one of his arms had been stripped from his flesh. He was still in a state of extreme distress. Between barely muted screams he continually called out, “Help me! Help me!”

Among those present was the head of the Emergency Department, a senior practitioner who gently and firmly reassured the young man that the situation was well in hand. He calmly and repeatedly drew the young man’s attention to his breathing while simultaneously instructing a younger doctor to slowly administer a 10 cc injection of the powerful dissociative anaesthetic ketamine. He quietly added, “You may need to do this four or five times” while continuing with his quasi-hypnotic instruction to breathe slowly and deeply.

My thoughts were then overwhelmed by a flood of images, many of which had been dormant for decades. I saw the image of a young Vietnamese girl, running naked down a road after she had been caught up in a napalm attack. I saw a Buddhist monk fixedly sitting within a storm of raging flame. I saw the flayed inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki wandering dazed and despairing through their smouldering streets. Then came the memories of Dresden, of Auschwitz, of the vast charnel grounds that Europe became in the first and second World Wars. And then a wave of images of the children of Gaza, of phosphorus bombs streaking through a UN compound, of furious explosions in Kabul, Baghdad, Mosul and Aleppo. And I recalled the vast arsenals of nuclear weapons with which the earth is so heavily seeded.

I thought again of the extraordinary privilege which we who are free of the terror of war zones and the horrors of extreme poverty, drought and famine so freely take for granted.

At a time when military planners intensify the demonic work of softening the world up for a normalisation of the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the ever-growing fields of war, let our hearts more fully awaken to the pain of the world, and particularly to the pain of those innocents caught up in war and preparations for war.

INDEX

Glowing Cores

Golden Prison
(The Curse of Tyranny)

Burning Horizons

In Memoriam

Terra Calda

Falling Veils

Georgius Rex

Desert Storm II

Ramallah
(Remembering Rachel Corrie)

Dancing Dust

Sisters True

Careful Now

It All Depends On Who You’re Fighting

GLOWING CORES

We are all held subject by determined nations

And the determinations of planners

Intent on lashing the flanks

And not restraining the reins

Of the dark horses of night.

They champ and thunder

In anticipation of the silence.

You who thread the darkening looms,

Who kindle the currents coursing through wires

And charge the air, earth, and water of our being,

Beware the fruits of your projections.

The dangerous matters you have gathered

Softly seethe in darkened silos,

In hollow vessels plying silent under ocean storms

And glowing cores of hellish boilers.

And still you plan for more.

GOLDEN PRISONThe Curse of Tyranny

Thus contained the Lords of War

Confined in finite time

Bound and fixed

(At least for now)

Wretched slayer of love and time,

Your dead stretch beyond you to impossible horizons.

The innocents you burned now blaze brightly before you.

They gather in a soft fury of light

Winding to the edge of the world.

Remain within that prison

Held fast by the golden light

Of those you bathed and burned.

And you, so false in name,

Playing the worse and not the better part,

You who rained ruin in proud and bloody storms

Be ye fixed until your fires burn cold.

River bright streaming from the brow of love,

Strengthen further the keepers of these Satans.

BURNING HORIZONS

What was it like when Dresden was sleeping

And the sky shrieked metal then crashed all around,

When the town was a furnace, a fiery hell-world

For mothers and children now under the ground.

And what was it like that big sky morning

When Little Boy cried then howled down the day,

The crashing of atoms, the tempest of terror

The unknowing mothers all gone away.

First in Kabul and then on the Tigris

Silicon soldiers tore open the night,

And wounded yet further a people near broken

And brought further darkness in fulminant light.

The hatred now stored in the cones of the missiles

Will rage and release in ruin and woe,

And the heart of the night pierced again with fierce metal

The blood and the water continue to flow.

I wait for the turn of a cheek that was promised

I wait for the love of a world now in woe

I wait for the call of a sorrowing mother

For terror on terror can nowhere go.

IN MEMORIAM

When your nights light up over vast distances

And the days of the many be cut short,

Shall they then prevail,

Those broken gods of war,

To burn again to cinder the work of ages?

Trouble enough there has been.

Trouble further we have seen.

Here, at the end of days,

We stand by the edge of ruin.

Still, my father tells me,

The universe is vast beyond imagining.

TERRA CALDA

We have been away for far too long

From the pull of the world and the day to day

From time of work and time of play.

The debt of the day too deep to repay

Has gone too far, has been too long,

Tell me now which way to turn

Which tune to give to the sacred song.

As newer nails of fire and metal

Pierce the armour and spoil the earth,

They burn the children before their birth,

For want of love, for want of worth.

In times now past upon the lake

The swan would slow and silent flow.

Yet in this time and in that place

The deadly metal seeps and soaks

Through riverbeds to ocean deeps.

And mother weeps.

Now time to call this to a halt,

Time to call this to an end,

There is no more that we can spend.

Make your way despoil no more,

Enough of blood, and death, and war.

And we will make our way in peace,

Find a hearth and till the earth,

Toil to turn the damage round

Regain again the sacred ground

Restore anew this broken place,

Through love and song, through sweat and grace.

Notes: During the first Gulf War, 300 tons of depleted Uranium was used in armour-piercing bullets and artillery shells. It was irretrievably dispersed through many parts of Iraq. Iraqi midwives increasingly despair over the many deformed and damaged children that have been birthed and that continue to arrive in areas where such ordnance was used.

Joseph Stalin, being most impressed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, lost no time in having his own versions of the same. The Soviet nuclear program at Chelyabinsk/ Mayak was fast-tracked into existence in 1946. The dross from uranium extraction processes was poured into the Techa River that conveniently ran through the town. Within 4 years, Geiger counters in the Arctic Ocean – many thousands of kilometres away – began to crackle furiously. Thereafter, the wastes of Chelyabinsk were poured directly into Lake Karachai, a lake some 50 km2 in size situated nearby. Anyone standing on the shores of Lake Karachai at the time of writing this poem would receive a lethal dose of radiation in the time it takes to eat a small meal.

Notes: On October 6th 2002, three Dominican nuns – all long-time peace activists – broke through the enclosure of an unmanned Minuteman III missile silo near Greeley, Colorado using wire cutters. On reaching the silo, they poured their own blood in the shape of crosses onto the silo. They then pounded the concrete lid of the silo with hammers, singing and praying for world peace while waiting to be arrested.

The judge described them as “dangerously irresponsible” and sentenced them to extended periods in prison. Sr. Jackie Hudson, aged 68, was imprisoned for 30 months, Sr. Carol Gilbert, aged 55, was imprisoned for 33 months, and Sr. Ardeth Platte, aged 67 years, was imprisoned for 41 months.

CAREFUL NOW

This is the wall of stone faces

This is the plain of dry skulls

How much blood must fallow

Before we’ve had enough?

No spear, no arrow

No shield or sabre close at hand

Blast of cannon barely muted

As thunder of jet and hiss of missile

Shake and shatter this careless time

Who can remember the two small suns

That flashed and crashed and flayed a people

And who can recall those white-hot suns

That trashed the cities ashed the people

In an empty triumph of stolen glory

Two wretched clouds of infernal fury

That burned all hope and poisoned the story

Careful now

Be careful now

Because we’ve had enough

We’ve grown too accustomed to spin and slaughter

To soft commands of deadly purpose

To haughty laughter in high places

Careful now

So let us look further

Let us pause longer

Let us recall those welcoming faces

As night draws nigh

Shape and shadow of glistening mountain

Sibilant stream and falling fountain

Whispering water chilling wind

Gold-streaked clouds at the close of the day

Remember these

As night draws nigh

This is the wall of stone faces

This is the plain of lost skulls

How much slaughter does it take

Before we’ve had enough?

IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHO YOU’RE FIGHTING

Light armour and swift-footedness

Can overcome giants

So long as you keep your distance.

They also serve those who would walk city streets and high roads

Deflecting and evading occasional dangers.

Brute force is hard to handle at close range

Without diamond-fast sight or diamond-hard fist,

Not to shatter

But to block the shattering blow.

The warlike man in times of peace

Must now make peace within himself.

Stay light on your feet.

Be swift in smile and presence.

Well conceal the mental blade

That cuts through all obstruction and deceit,

The ocean too long travelled now to harbour doubt.

Make peace, not war within yourself

And then the rest will follow.

Original post, with a link to a PDF of “Lines from the Edge of Darkness” can be accessed here:

Vincent Di Stefano is a retired osteopath and practitioner of natural medicine. He is author of “Holism and Complementary Medicine. History and Principles” published by Allen and Unwin in 2006. His website “The Healing Project” extends the ideas presented in the book and his blog “Integral Reflections” offers an occasional more interactive medium addressing those ideas.

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2 Comments

Heart-breaking depiction of the lives of sufferers. They may be Palestinians, afghans or syrians, they have similar woes. The Chernobyl disaster or Bhopal disaster, the poor are the worst sufferers. These poems represent various lives with common thread of suffering. Many poets, seigfred Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and others have rendered accounts of horrors of war. These lines are extension of the perils of war.

Thank you for your considered response K Sheshu Babu. You have clearly understood the heartbreak and the horror as reflected both in the events of recent decades ,and as expressed by poets who have lived and died through such events. I look forward to commenting on your own personal reflections in CounterCurrents before long.

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